The Don's Secret Wife Was Mafia Royalty novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Everyone's Invited

The clerk started clapping first.

Then the old man with the cane, and the couple in sweatshirts, and a security guard who'd come to see what the noise was.

Teo slid the ring onto my finger, on the floor of the Cook County Clerk's Office, next to the emerald.

Benedetta cried and said it was allergies.

We set it for Saturday, May fifteenth, at Our Lady of Pompeii.

The same church.

"Are you sure?" Teo said, that night at my kitchen table. "We can go anywhere."

"It's my parish," I said. "I'm not giving it to her."

The christening was at ten.

The wedding was at noon.

"Two ceremonies, one Mass, one dress for the babies to throw up on," my grandmother said. "Efficient."

On the morning of May fifteenth, the tailor from the 1000 block came up my stairs with a garment bag.

He'd had my mother's red dress since March.

The silk was ruined, wine and smoke both.

But he'd saved the little covered buttons, all twenty-two of them.

He'd sewn them down the back of my wedding dress, ivory silk to the floor, one by one.

Benedetta did them up.

She cried on every single one.

"Stop," I said.

"I'm not crying. It's the buttons. They're tiny. I have to squint."

I wore my mother's locket.

I wore my grandmother's emerald on my right hand and my plain gold band on my left.

The church was full by nine-thirty.

The whole block was there, in their best clothes.

The deli sisters had matching hats and had fought about it in my kitchen for a week.

The five families filled the right side of the aisle, with their wives and their mothers.

The man in the blue scarf stood in the back with his mother on his arm.

Nobody collected the phones at the door.

The christening came first.

Benedetta held my son at the font.

The old baker held my daughter, in his only suit, with his hands shaking so badly the priest had to steady them.

The priest poured the water over my son's head and said his name.

It was my father's.

My son screamed the whole church down about it.

Then he poured the water over my daughter and said hers.

It was my mother's.

She didn't cry at all.

She watched the priest the whole time with her steady eyes.

In the front pew, my grandmother put her hand over her mouth.

At noon the organ started.

The old bodyguard pushed my grandmother's wheelchair to the back of the church, where I was waiting.

She looked up at me in the ivory and the buttons and the locket.

"You look like her," she said. "Don't trip."

She held out her hand.

I took it.

And she gave me away from her wheelchair, the old bodyguard pushing, all the way up the aisle.

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